| Not an accurate depiction? Perhaps you should read up on how Lombardy's health care system fared for Italy. Or travel to Bellevue Nebraska, and ask why non-COVID patients are being kept in ER (hint: it's because all the non-ER beds are full of COVID patients). Also, you're idea of how herd immunity functions is not accurate. We'll have the virus here in 6 months; no doubt in my mind. We'll have it combined with the annual flu. We won't have a vaccine either, though perhaps some therapeutic treatment if we're lucky. No, we won't reach herd immunity for at least a year at this rate. And the political pressure to "open up" the economy will become too great since we don't have a real welfare net in America. So my estimate at the end of the year is that we'll have about 40% of the population infected or recovered. We'll have roughly 19M hospitalized during the next 8 months, and 1.4M deaths. This will cripple our country, our economy, and our people. Yeah, I'm a pessimist. Everything I've seen about how this country is reacting confirms my priors. How can we avoid this? Keep things shut down to a bare minimum of true essential services. Protect the employees doing essential services to the max. Implement a social safety net so workers don't lose everything. Do the same for businesses, since demand is drying up fast. Listen to scientists instead of firing them for disagreeing with the POTUS about hydrochloroquine. Develop reliable serological tests so that immune people can safely work. Most importantly, be lucky. The US has been lucky for a long long time; for most of its history. Hopefully that will continue, and rub off on the rest of the world that is in far dire straits. |
You cannot "just" provide a social safety net. That's not how the economy works. Somewhere between 10 and 20% of households with kids did not have enough to eat. Now more people, especially the poor, are out of work, and food prices have gone up because we're producing less food. Giving a handout to keep people afloat makes sense as a short term fix but it's not a viable long term solution.
You're saying we're going to see 1.4M deaths on the current track. Well what's the deaths on your track? There's NO WAY to open up the economy without the virus resuming its spread. You haven't lowered the deaths, you've just delayed it at great economic cost.